I turned to find a tall, attractive brunette dressed in a black polo shirt, jeans, and running shoes and wearing a gold badge on a chain around her neck.
“Alex Cross,” I said. “I work as an investigative consultant for the FBI and the DC Metro Police.”
Detective Parks cocked her head, smiled, and shook my hand, oozing Southern warmth. “I know you, Dr. Cross. Back in the day, I attended several lectures you gave on criminal psychology during a six-week investigative course I took at Quantico.”
“I hope my talks were helpful?”
“Very much so,” she said. “To what do I owe this honor?”
“I wanted to talk to you about the Doctor’s Orders murders.”
Parks frowned. “I closed the file on them a long time ago. The right man is sitting on death row in Kirkland.”
I held up my hands. “I’m not here to reopen your case, Detective Parks. I just want to talk.”
“About what, exactly?”
“Well, among other things, Thomas Tull.”
The detective stiffened, looked past me at the desk sergeant, who was filling out paperwork, and blew out her breath in resignation. “I figured someone official would come sniffing around about Thomas eventually. I’m actually glad it’s someone of your caliber, Dr. Cross.”
“Okay,” I said, a bit surprised by her answer. “Is there somewhere we can talk?”
Parks hesitated. “This is supposed to be my day off. But sure, just not here.”
She gestured toward the doors. We walked outside. It was gorgeous weather, low eighties with a light breeze that caused the palm trees to sway.
“How much do you know about the case?” Parks asked.
“I read the first hundred and fifty pages of Doctor’s Orders last night on the flight down from Boston.”
She gave me a sidelong glance. “You were up there looking into the Electric murders?”
I nodded.
“Well,” Parks said and cleared her throat. “That is interesting.”
“Can you bring me up to speed on this case? From your perspective?”
Parks thought about that and then shrugged. “Why not? Let’s take my car.”
For the next few hours, the detective drove me around old and new Charleston, showing me the locations of the pivotal scenes in the murders of five prominent physicians. All of the victims had lived in gated communities.
“The first two were out on Johns Island,” Parks said. “The last three were up on Daniel Island, facing the Wando River.”
Dr. Carl Jameson was the first to die. A divorced surgeon with a thriving practice who was part owner of a private surgical center, Jameson had lived in a big home on the eighteenth fairway of a golf course in Kiawah River Estates.
The detective stopped her car across the street from the house and said the killer had been meticulous in the Jameson case. Parks had been the first detective on the scene after a housekeeper discovered the surgeon dead on his kitchen table, his throat cut with a razor.
“Blood all over,” she said. “Which was amazing because there was no sign of the killer walking away through it and very little forensic evidence other than the body and the box cutter.”
The early investigation had focused on Jameson’s ex-wife, Claudia, and their tempestuous marriage and acrimonious divorce. Claudia had recently petitioned the court to increase her alimony payments, which the surgeon had opposed.
“She seemed like the obvious choice,” Parks said. “Or her live-in boyfriend, the top tennis pro on Kiawah. But both Claudia and the pro had ironclad alibis for the evening of Jameson’s murder.”
Parks started driving again. The second killing, she told me, came five weeks later, when Dr. Sandra Handle, an ob-gyn, was strangled in her home across the street from the seventh tee in another golf-course community on Johns Island. Her husband found her corpse upon his return from a fishing trip.
We pulled up in front of the Handles’ former home.
“Different method but the same attention to detail,” the detective said. “Even though it was a violent death, we found no DNA under Dr. Handle’s fingernails or on her body or anywhere, for that matter.”
“Enter Thomas Tull,” I said.
Parks’s jaw shifted a little. She put the car in drive and headed for Daniel Island. “That’s right. Within a week of Handle’s murder, he showed up, said he felt in his bones that this was going to be his next book.”
“You just let him into the investigation?”
She did that thing with her jaw again. “Thomas sort of slid in after sweet-talking the police chief and the mayor. I mean, he was kind of a celebrity. Everybody I knew read his books, including me.”
I waited until we were on Daniel Island and approaching the third murder scene before I said, “When did you start sleeping with the writer?”
CHAPTER 47
DETECTIVE PARKS’S JAW STAYED set as she pulled over onto the shoulder of a road.
“Suzanne Liu tell you that?” she demanded.
“She told me she called you the other day and you hung up on her,” I said.
“Damn straight I hung up on her. She all but called me a whore. I mean, talk about the pot calling the kettle black. She slept with the guy all the time!”
I held up both hands. “I didn’t know that and I’m not making any judgments here.”
“Well, I hope the hell you do, Dr. Cross! My reputation is at stake!”
“I’m just running down leads, same as you would do in this situation. Did you sleep with him?”
Parks took a deep breath. “For almost two years. Thomas has … he has a way of making you fall in love with him and not think too badly of him when he dumps you.”
“You called Tull after Liu called you.”
“First time in two years. But I thought he should know what his former editor was saying about him.”
“He threatened her,” I said. “I heard the recording.”
“I certainly had nothing to do with it if he did.”
“Tull never mentioned the affair in the book.”
“Thank God. My mother would have been mortified.”
“I’m sorry, but did you know Tull also had affairs with the female detectives in Electric and Noon in Berlin?”
Parks swallowed hard. “No, but it doesn’t surprise me. Like I said, he has a way of making women fall in love with him.”
After that, she took me to the site where the third Charleston doctor had been murdered, an area of big homes, all with docks that reached far out across the tidal flats to the Wando River.
“Peter Mason—an ear, nose, and throat specialist—died out there,” Parks said, pointing to the T at the end of the nearest dock. “Beaten to death with an oar. The last two murder scenes are a few miles north. We believe the killer came in off the river via the docks.”
“And Tull was here for all three of those investigations?”
“He was.”
“In the book, Tull says it was your idea to change the course of the investigation and start looking into the doctors’ medical-malpractice suits. Is that right? Or did he suggest it?”
Detective Parks stared into the middle distance for a long time before replying. “He did. It was his idea.” Tull, she said, reasoned that the killings could all be revenge for shoddy medical work. Sure enough, they found that all five victims had been accused of medical malpractice on multiple occasions.